E for Everlasting
by planet p
Summary: Change of title! AU; a bit about Broots's life, and his quest to be a decent person in the face of reality. Broots/Mrs Broots, Broots/Brigitte


_1958_

It's an awful day to be inside; it's like being trapped in an invisible cage: outside it is sunny and the sky is the bluest she's seen it in a long, long time. She'd love to be outside right now, but she's pregnant and it's far too far along. It's almost time now, she knows: it's almost time for baby to enter the world.

Her husband wants a boy, she wants a girl.

She'll be so relieved when it's done, when the baby's out; she'll be able to do things like normal again, she'll be able to live again; it'll be like waking up from a deep, troubling sleep: she'll shake out her limbs and spring back into life, determined to put all sign of the earlier darkness behind her. She's not that old, she tells herself: for Pete's sake!

She's going to live again. When this baby's out, there'll be no stopping her!

It's only a few hours later, after this thought, that the baby comes. It's a boy, it – _he_ – is also very loud. He screams and screams; the sound hurts her ears tremendously, it's almost ridiculous how much she already dislikes that sound.

She doesn't dislike the baby; she couldn't hate her own baby, she'll just be so glad when he's older, when he'll understand when she tells him to keep quiet and keep his mouth shut: she'll be _so_ glad!

She names him Ezra: he's going to be daddy's little helper, certainly, he's not going to be her best friend: he's a boy, she'd wanted a girl; but she's not going to go through all of it again just to get her way, she's done, now; she's done her part.

Her husband makes no comment on the name: it'll work.

* * *

_1974_

It's the seventies and he's sixteen, but his mother's no less pushy for it: what's new, she's been the same way his whole life. She wants him to quit school and get a job; he's almost considering it when he meets Alicia.

Alicia is beautiful like her hair, and he thinks he loves her from the first moment he sees her. She's older than him, though. Only by a year, but a year that the law looks on very seriously. He's not really allowed to love her as much as he does, not for another year yet, so he tries to play it down (not that it really works).

He knows this is the girl he's going to marry.

Alicia doesn't like the idea of him quitting school; she's all for his going on with school. She says his mother can just think any damn thing she likes, and he can think another; she's not him, it's not her life, she can hate it as much as she likes but that doesn't mean she still doesn't have to lump it.

He thinks his mother's going to tell his father to tell him to get on out of the house and find himself somewhere else to live, when he roughly relays Alicia's words back to her, but that's not how it plays out.

She locks him in his bedroom and calls the priest of her church (he counts himself lucky it wasn't the closet; she'd been so fond of locking him in closets as a child, he remembers); he wonders if she's going to have the priest exorcise him, and how much that's going to cost. (His mother will probably take it out of his weekly allowance; that is, if she's planning on allowing him one at all for the next week.)

* * *

_1977_

He goes away to study at a university when he's nineteen; Alicia is there with him, though she's not studying herself. She says she wouldn't be able to stand it, she'd want to slap every one of those smug lecturers' faces, and that, as they say, wouldn't go down a treat. He chooses to think of it as part of her playful, extrovert side. (Alicia would never hurt anyone, not even a fly. She talks, but she never follows through with actions.)

He knows they're going to have to be married very soon because he can't wait much longer: he loves this girl. He hopes with everything in him that she loves him, too.

* * *

_1978_

They're married a year after he left home to pursue tertiary studies: Alicia is beautiful in his mother's awful, old wedding dress. She's a queen and he's a king. Just to be standing beside her in that dress, to soon be pronounced as husband and wife, he feels his heart breaking.

His mother doesn't cry, it's not her cup of tea, but he wants to; he wants to cry and cry.

Alicia is an orphan, her parents died when she was young, so they're obviously absent from the proceedings. His mother turns her nose up at this, but he doesn't let it get him down; she came, after all, didn't she?

She leaves halfway through the reception; she doesn't care for the food or the entertainment: she tells him, later, that she should have had a girl. At least, if she'd had a girl, she'd have been able to have more influence over who she married.

She tells him her exact opinion of his new wife: it is that she is a 'floozy.'

He tells her to kindly leave their house (it's rented; his father's waiting out in the car, parked up on the curb) and never return.

She leaves; she doesn't come back that year. He thinks she means to do just what he'd said: to never return.

He cries about that, too. (He hates that his mother is so serious about the meaning of words. Well, he might have meant exactly that for exactly ten minutes, but then he hadn't; then he'd been okay again, he'd settled down again. But that's not how it works with his mother, and his father doesn't have anything to say, really. That's always been his official line.)

* * *

_1985_

He's twenty-seven when he gets a job for a place called the Center. He hears they pay well and the work is interesting. He's had other jobs before, but this one looks like a keeper. They seem to like him, and he thinks he can warm up to his new job and their way of doing things. The payments on the house are coming along nicely, and every time he looks at Alicia he swears she just looks better and better: he loves her so much.

She doesn't work; instead, she stays at home and does things around the house. He comes home one day to find her asleep on the couch with her head on the coffee table. She'd been playing cards and she'd fallen asleep. He shuffles all the cards together and puts them back into the pack and walks around the coffee table to lift her up and take her to bed. He nearly drops her the first time, but the second time he actually manages it. He half-carries, half-drags her to bed and sits for a long time at the end of the bed watching her sleep: she hasn't stirred at all.

Later, when he's watching television, she wakes and comes into the lounge room. She stands in front of the television, blocking his view of the screen, and begins yelling him out over ruining her game of cards. He laughs about it (when he finally gets what she's so angry about), but she doesn't laugh back.

They go out for dinner to a restaurant/diner than does roast dinners and her skin looks strange under the artificial light, her red hair is tired, but he still loves her. He wants to get up out of his seat and take her hand, he wants to forget about their food and take her outside and kiss her.

Instead he watches her; she's hungry, and he smiles when he remembers how she'd raged at him. He doesn't think anything of it, then; he loves her too much to think on it for too long, it's easy to dismiss that it'd just been her reaction to waking up and finding herself somewhere else to where she'd been when she'd fallen asleep, to disorientation and blurriness from sleep.

The ride home is silent like a stone; she goes straight to bed.

He locks up and goes to bed after her: he could never stop loving her, he thinks.

* * *

_1987_

Two years later, and after nine years of marriage, it's a completely different kettle of fish. It's not that he doesn't love her, but time has been bad to them; now, they're all wrong for each other. Alicia loses her cool at the slightest drop of a hat, and she never lets him kiss her. It's too much for him to be so close to her, every day, and to never be allowed to be _close_ to her; to never be allowed to touch her or hold her or kiss her. They don't even make love anymore.

She'll stay awake long into the night, or the early morning; and when he wakes up in the morning he'll walk into the lounge room to find her sleeping on the couch with the television on, or, worse, on the kitchen floor.

Sometimes, he'll come home from work to find her sitting at the kitchen table and she'll have taken all of the food out of the refrigerator and the cupboards, the doors will all still be open, and she'll just be staring off into space. When he tries to reach for her, she'll hit his hand away, or when he tries to put the food away, she'll hit him then, too.

He's scared that she's sick, that she's really, really sick, but she won't talk with him about it, and there's nothing he can do until she talks. He just can't bring himself to ring in anyone on her, to ring in mental health services. He tells himself it's just that she's down, that she's at a crossroads in her life, she's stuck, that it'll pass: she's not mad!

After a few weeks, she comes back to bed, but she frequently wakes up in the middle of the night and hollers at him until he, too, wakes. Just when he thought she'd been getting better, this happens. He knows it's the end for them; he knows they'll have to go their own ways before they destroy each other: he can't bear the thought of ever hurting her, and if that's what his sticking around – his loving her – is doing to her, then he knows he's going to have to talk himself into leaving.

It's the hardest thing he's ever had to do, but he does it because he loves her. He hires a lawyer and makes the appointment at his office (his track record for making appointments is crappy, probably the crappiest he's ever heard of before; but he makes _this_ appointment); it breaks his heart, and he cries on the drive home.

Every time he looks at a calendar or hears the date on the radio or television, he begins to hate the year: it's the worst year he's ever had to go through.

It's the year he divorces Alicia; it's the year he loses everything that's ever mattered to him. He has no family anymore after losing Alicia, no friends, no one he cares about: it's just her, it's always going to be her.

He cries a lot that year, but never when he thinks anyone might see. He doesn't want anyone else, he wants Alicia.

* * *

_1996_

Midway through the nineties is an interesting time for him; he receives a transfer to Delaware, a city by the coast. He's never really dug the ocean, but it's a change and it comes along with a job, so he takes it.

He moves house, but he can't bring himself to care. It's just one more house, it'll never be his home, not really, not without Alicia.

Alicia was his home; in her eyes he'd been able to see everything he'd ever wanted in life, everything that had ever mattered, she'd made him feel safe and warm, she'd been his anchor; she'd kept him sane. Now, without her, he thinks maybe he's gone a little insane.

It's not really a big thing, though; it's not like he has anyone who really cares enough to ask, _Hey, man, how have you been lately?_ That's not how the Center works, and he's glad.

Until he's assigned to Jarod's retrieval team; until he meets Sydney; until _that_ phone call.

Sydney is forever making other people's business his business; it makes him wonder if Sydney even has a life of his own, or maybe he's just not really into his own life. But he supposes everyone has their reasons, and that they should be respectfully approached from a distance and not barged in on with a quick, _So, hey, tell me _all_ about it!_

Sydney isn't like that; he's just there. It's more Miss Parker's style, though she wouldn't really agree. She's always, _Yeah, so this is how it's gonna go down because I say so!_ There's never any room for objection or anyone else's opinions. If anyone ever came up with something different, he can fully see her stomping on their opinion along with them.

She smokes and drinks and she's frequently abrasive in her manner and obnoxious in her speech, but no-one stands up to her because her father's the boss; she's the boss's daughter: she gets it her way, every damn time!

She's not his daughter and she's not his girlfriend and she's not his friend: he tells himself it's her business, not his.

And then comes the call.

He can't believe it, at first; and then he decides that for whatever reason Alicia had chosen not to tell him that he had a daughter, that it must be a pretty damn good one. It's not his place to intrude on that, but it _hurts_. He's a father, but he'd never even known before: his kid's nine – and he's never met her before! She doesn't even know his name!

Her name is Debbie, apparently. Just thinking about her name makes him cry.

He doesn't ring back that first time; he makes sure to ring back when Debbie's at school. Alicia tells him that she's a real studious student and that she's always conscientious about her conduct with the other kids and the teachers: she's a good kid.

She doesn't say, _You'd like her._ He almost thanks her for that. he asks her if there's anything he can do without rocking the boat too much; suggests monetary help, she doesn't speak for a long time, then comes back with a, _Yeah, that sounds okay._

So that's how it is with them.

* * *

_1999_

She's twelve, and that's the first time he ever sees her. He doesn't even have a photograph, a picture, but she looks so much like her mother that he can't believe he's just taken her away from her, he can't believe that he's just separated them; he keeps thinking that Alicia's going to turn up any minute, like he's going to get them both instead of just one of them: he's going to finally have a family again.

But it's just her, just Debbie.

She's quiet. He doesn't ask her about her mom. He's been a bad dad, he knows she's probably thinking. Never came to see her, never sent her letters, cards; anything. He doesn't challenge this assumption; he has been that, he thinks.

He feels bad. Bad for leaving when he should have fought; should have fought with everything in him to keep Alicia, to be for her what she needed him to be!

But he didn't fight, and he can't un-write history, and, he remembers, that it was so fucking hard!

Now he's a dad, he has a family again; but now he's the one feeling like the stranger. He doesn't know what to believe even when it's coming out of his own mouth or it's his own feelings.

* * *

_2000_

He doesn't tell Brigitte about Debbie, though he guesses she hears about the girl anyway. She tells him good on him, he's finally got someone to keep him grounded. It's not the same with them as before, now she's married, but he still cares. He thinks it's probably because she cares, too, though she _never_ shows it to anyone but him.

She's two people at the same time, sometimes trying to be just one, sometimes trying to be the other, sometimes wishing for something else: same as him.

He feels like maybe he failed her, too, when he hears that she died. He'd really felt like he'd been starting to get back some of the old feeling of being able to care about someone else, but she's gone, and then it's just Debbie: just Debbie's left.

He knows it's his second – or is it third – chance; his chance to be better, to be his kid's mainstay; to be a real father; to be _something_ real.

He doesn't resent it, he doesn't hate it; it just feels so unreal. It's strange like that, he supposes, how real life can feel so foreign, so confusing.

He really hopes he'll be able to be a good dad and a positive influence on his kid.

* * *

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

**Thanks for reading.**


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